Smart cities & IoT

 

Nowadays, there are over 400 companies offering IoT solutions and around 7 billion connected smart devices. The heterogeneity of modern IoT platforms and their vertical focus on a single business domain (Smart Home, Smart Buildings, etc) has resulted in obstacles for offering cross-platform and cross-domain smart solutions to meet the citizens’ everyday multi-dimensional needs. It’s more than prevalent that the fragmented IoT market leads to suboptimal solutions. It’s not that a few IoT technologies will prevail; it’s rather the urgent need to cater for IoT interoperability; one of the top two challenges in the IoT domain, with the other one being security. Putting aside interoperability, modern IoT devices and smart systems need to directly and automatically interact with each other to efficiently address the end users’ needs, without needing constantly their intervention. Exchange of data between IoT devices is already happening, but the need to track these interactions is becoming more urgent. In the era of digital markets, data transactions need to be monitored, authorized and charged. Finally, the high entrance barriers of the IoT market, often discourages start-ups or small business with innovative ideas. In this context, the IoTFeds project proposes a solution that will enable small IoT companies to form partnerships so as to address common needs and collectively operate a controlled market for the exchange of IoT data. The IoTFeds solution introduces an Open Source middleware that allows IoT platform providers to form IoT federations and operate a distributed IoT data marketplace, without the need of a centralized entity to operate the market. The IoTFeds project will be based on the outcomes of the H2020 symbIoTe project and will combine it with Blockchain technologies towards the implementation of a fully distributed federation management and marketplace framework. The envisioned functionality of the IoTFeds middleware addressed the IoT Federation needs (formation of federations, joining and leaving the federation, IoT interoperability, distributed advertisement and discovery of federated resources, unified and secure interface for accessing the federated resources, reputation and trust mechanisms for the operation of the federation), as well as the IoT marketplace needs (logging all IoT transactions, setting prices and charging policies, market clearing, non-monetary bartering schemes, sharing the generated value among federation members). Thus, an IoT federation can be considered as a B2B environment for IoT platforms to expose IoT resources, exchange IoT data and combine their services so as to address bigger project and cross-platform/domain needs. The IoTFeds project will validate the aforementioned functionality through a small-scale pilot in the domain of Smart City. 

 

More Information...

In the context of project INCEPTION we developed a specialized virtual marketplace for IoT data where sellers of information (sensors) and buyers of information (applications) dynamically interact to create an open market and define compensations (rewards) and charges for providing and consuming information according to its usefulness and market availability. The marketplace utilises appropriate incentives mechanisms leading to achieving improved service delivery and greater participation by the community.

Download poster